The straits shouldered tide the way a strong man shouldered a door—grudging, effective, not gentle. From the cliff lip the water lay in long ribs, slate and iron, a current combed by rock.
Ash knelt by a cairn of old signal stones and squinted along the channel. "There," she said. "Convoy in two files. Low bulwarks, heavy—grain or meal. If they miss the bend they'll ride the lee and stall until somebody tidy finds them."
Fen raised the narrow flag he'd stitched for hungry but stubborn and tested the wind with his cheek. "Two hush-sails off the point," he said. "Clerks in good boats. They've learned to wear neat like armor."
Ylva pointed her chin west. On the farther horizon a bruise of weather marched, not eager—steady, like a team that knows its route. "Storm enough to be helpful," she said. "If you call it here you owe her a death. If you harness what's coming, she'll let you pay in fatigue and good behavior."
Asgrim stood with Fellgnýr wrapped, Skylaug easy against his forearm. The runes along his collarbones lifted their heads and waited like hounds trained not to bolt at the sight of a hare. He felt the storm's breath in his bones before the wind admitted it to the air.
"Truth," he said, because he didn't get thunder without a proper receipt. "We'll feed the famine boats and spare those patrols their dead. Bread before brag."
He walked to the cliff's knuckle where basalt bit sky and planted the hammer.
Not a ring of hush. A stake—iron down through grit and lichen and forgotten fish bones into the stone's stubborn. The world around the head woke at the anchor point with a shock, not sound—a presence that told air what its job was and reminded water it had one too.
He set waypoints in the sky: three small cleats of pressure so shallow a gull could perch and preen—one above the western horn where weather would arrive, one a spear-length over the channel's center, one downwind where the convoy's square sails could catch modest glory. He laid a second line low across the hush-boats' lane—a sleepy slack line like a rope a man trips on only if he deserves the lesson.
"Make the yoke," Ash said, reading his hands the way she reads grain in oak. "Two horns. Don't lift more than your back can carry."
He hooked the coming storm.
Not by shouting. He offered the planted tether the weight of a ridge and the patience of a boatbuilder. Wind that had been thinking of strolling decided to lean. He walked Fellgnýr along the sky-cleats—bow to throat to tail—and taught the gust to take the friendly lane and forget the other.
Below, the convoy's first two hulls shouldered into the line of breath and found purchase. Sails bellowed their relief. Yardarms creaked and apologized. Men on decks looked up once as if trying to catch someone's eye and, finding only work, went about it.
The hush-boats hit the slack line and learned humility. Their bell-mouths hunted wind and found paper. Canvas hung as if rebuked. They made headway by doctrine and oars, which are honest but slow.
"Hold that," Ylva said, and even her voice kept itself small so it wouldn't wake a debt.
Asgrim held.
The yoke pulled.
The planted tether drank from him—not hunger, duty. The lines under his skin went hot-cool, hot-cool, as if quenched in a bucket that belonged to somebody else's memory. He tasted juniper baked above midday rock and then could not summon the feel of it; he reached for the stink of pitch on a midsummer dock and found only the shape of the thought, not its summer fat. He murmured the words to himself—berry-hands, eelgrass, stone heat—and heard them from a distance, like a man listening to a story his uncle insists on telling every year.
Ash's hand landed quick and firm on his elbow. "Keep the lane," she said—not let go, not more. Exact. She pressed two fingers to the chain where Fen's tar-knot would bite if he reached for a flourish.
Fen flagged the convoy with short, rude wisdom: stay left; you're welcome; don't be clever. Oars answered with gratitude disguised as efficiency. The third and fourth boats slid into the breath and grew taller in the water like men who have been eating soup for a week and are handed meat. A child on the nearest stern waved at the cliff without understanding why; somebody's mother knocked knuckles on a mast and spoke to it like a saint.
Far off and lower than anyone wanted to admit, bell-barges moved where the straits widened—pairs lashed tight and low under scaffold: timber ribs, hush-metal plates swaddled in linen, lattice for choir platforms, a frame as big as arrogance. They ferried their cathedral in pieces, each barge a sermon preached in shipping terms. Even from here the air felt shaved where they passed.
"That's not a church," Ash said through her teeth. "That's a lid."
"The Jarl's gathering for his Great Quiet," Fen said. He didn't spit. Spit would have been ceremony.
"Hold," Ylva said again, calm as a ledger. "If the yoke flickers now, their sternmost will slew and make the sea do arithmetic we won't like."
He held.
The storm leaned harder, pleased to be turned into a job. Wind ran the friendly lane in a low, steady drum. The hush-boats rowed a little faster and didn't like being out of books. The convoy grew toward safety, a chain of bellies answering to breath instead of tidy.
The cost crept—not sharp, a thinning. He tried to pull up the taste of sour cream on rye at the midsummer table and found the memory acceptable but not his; he knew the story of boys who slept on warm stone and woke with sun on their backs and couldn't feel it on his shoulder where it ought to rise. The beam over his door with HARBOR FIRST, WAR LAST stayed vivid; the cove whose name he'd lost stayed respectfully absent. The whole season that would fatten those two truths thinned like milk stretched past decency.
"A little longer," Ash said, seeing it in his mouth. Her hand stayed; the count in her wrist matched the low drum the village had taught his ribs. "Don't be a hero," she added, which is how a shipwright says I love you to a dangerous day.
He walked the cleats one more careful circuit and felt the convoy clear the bend. The last hull found the lane and took it; the coil of boats straightened like a sentence that had been pestered into grammar. He watched until the far stern's wake ran straight for the first time and then—only then—he unplanted.
The tether let go like a good knot does: proud of having held, not offended at being asked to stop. Wind slid back to its uncommitted drift. The hush-boats recovered a smudge of dignity and pretended they had always meant to row this much. Below the point the bell-barges bore their hush-weight toward the capital, a procession without music.
Asgrim went to one knee and braced his hands on stone. The wrong violet under the sailcloth cooled as if embarrassed by how much it had wanted the bigger act. The runes beneath his skin settled into quiet lines; summer's heat under them stayed thin as watered beer.
Ylva crouched in front of him and looked into his pupils like a woman tallying fish. "Ledger?" she asked.
"Not sea-debt," he said, voice rust-rough. "We didn't call her. We borrowed what was on its way."
"Paid with season," Ylva said. "As expected." She was neither cruel nor tender about it. "You'll get some of it back when you're old enough to deserve it. The rest is gone and you will be kinder for having missed it."
"I will be irritated," Asgrim said, dry, and Ash's mouth quirked despite herself.
Fen watched the convoy widen its water between hush-boats and bell-barges. "We saved their bread," he said, meaning more than bread.
"And we didn't drown the clerks to buy it," Ash said, the pride she respected hidden under engineering. "I will like that memory when it comes back to you in winter."
He thumbed his bead-cord. Nothing had gone cold like a name; his sister's hole stayed a hole, honest, unprodded. He didn't add a bead; no death had been asked. He tied a small, ugly half-knot between Thunder keeps oaths and Warden—paid—a reminder: long tether—thin summer—and left it there to catch his fingers when sweetness asked for more than the day was worth.
On the flats below, the bell-barges passed the place where the friendly lane had been and didn't notice the ghost of it. Linen over hush-metal made the air behave the way rooms behave when children are told to hush and adults agree because they are tired.
"The cathedral of quiet," Fen said. "They'll bolt it together and call it mercy."
"They'll call the noise we make disrespect," Ash said. "We'll bring respect with hammers and voices."
The convoy put a point of land between itself and danger. A flag flew at the last stern—three quick snaps, crooked, grateful. The wind, deprived of its job, wandered off to consider better employment.
Asgrim stood. He put his palm flat to the wrapped head and let the hammer feel how little applause was on offer. Then he faced the sea and spoke the sentence the stones on this cliff had earned the right to hear:
"By bread, by wind we've taught into a good job, by work—ours—I'll spend before I ask you to."
Thunder—proper thunder—didn't answer. It wasn't owed. Far off, under the city's future, a different soundlessness considered how large it could afford to be.
Ash tapped the cairn stone back into place with the care you give a hinge you plan to use again. "We'll quarter streets next," she said. "If we can feed ovens and lungs, we can teach a city to remember what living costs."
"Quarter the wind," Fen said, liking the phrase and not delaying the next argument. "Then crack their bell."
Asgrim looked where the bell-barges had gone and where the convoy would arrive. Between them lay a city that wanted to be covered. He felt summer drain a fraction more and didn't bargain with it. He set his hand to the work and the work set its hand back, and for a moment the world smelled like tar, rain, and bread—that portion of summer craft gets to keep.